Abstract

Anti-Semantics II challenges the assumption that meaning is the primary unit of reading. It argues that something may already be readable before it is fixed as meaning, intention, interpretation, or explanation. Written in Japanese after the development of Kasei-Theory, the monograph is not an application of Kasei-Theory to semantics, literary theory, or reading theory. It examines instead the processes through which readout is recovered, stabilized, and preserved as meaning. The central distinction is between readout and reading. Readout designates the following of form, difference, trace, arrangement, repetition, silence, or sequence before these are fixed as meaning. Reading designates the configuration in which what has been read out is passed into meaning, intention, context, and explanation. The distinction is analytical rather than a simple temporal succession. Interpretation is therefore not treated as arrival at the object. It is treated as substitution: what has been read out is transferred into another word, concept, intention, context, or explanatory system. Explanation organizes this substitution. Understanding temporarily stabilizes it on the side of the receiver. Conviction further closes the question. Preservation-control makes the stabilized result recordable, shareable, quotable, and reusable. These processes are not rejected. They may be necessary for communication, criticism, scholarship, and institutional preservation. However, they do not necessarily preserve what was initially readable. A central claim of Anti-Semantics II is that local readability does not establish total meaning. A readable silence does not disclose the complete intention of a speaker. A repeated image does not by itself fix the meaning of an entire work. A strong trace does not automatically become the truth of an event. Meaning-centers, authorial intention, central themes, and total interpretations are therefore not simply denied. What is denied is their automatic privilege. None is entitled, merely by being readable or widely accepted, to fix an entire work, object, event, or reading as a single semantic whole. The book develops analyses of non-transmissive co-fixation, local readout, the non-coincidence of local readout and total meaning, collation-time coherence, structural simultaneity, object-side difference configuration, readout surface, readability media, readout direction, abstraction-display, semantic recovery of unreadability, interpretation-substitution, meaning-center non-maintenance, and the non-identity of readout and reading. Anti-Semantics II is not anti-intellectual, anti-reading, or anti-interpretive. It does not reject meaning, explanation, understanding, or shared interpretation. It separates the analytical levels through which readout is recovered as meaning and argues that semantic recovery is not identical with readout itself. Original Japanese title: 反意味論II This record contains a continuing version of Anti-Semantics II. The file will be updated as subsequent parts are added.